October 12, 2024

Welcome to the Website!

Let’s Build a Few Barns!

Bob Rowe, TWTC Trail Boss

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

- Wallace Stegner

Welcome to The Western Transmission Consortium’s website!

There is nothing more western than a barn raising.

The Western Transmission Consortium (TWTC) is a barn raising to help get the West’s next phase of critical infrastructure built. It’s grassroots. It’s bottoms up. It’s a big tent.

A barn raising is voluntary. Folks pitch in to get the work done, then help build the next one, and everyone benefits. There’s a cookout or two to celebrate along the way.

The original barn raisings were pragmatic ways to build critical infrastructure for an agricultural economy. Trust was built through repetition; over time everyone who participated benefited. The Western Transmission Consortium is a pragmatic approach to today’s western critical infrastructure needs. It’s operationally and business focused. It’s complementary to the other good work being done in the West. Through an open process in which a variety of stakeholders can participate, it builds trust and everyone will benefit.

The West Needs Transmission

Everyone recognizes that the nation requires more transmission, especially the long lines that will help move energy from where it’s best produced to where it’s needed. That will allow vastly more low- and no-carbon resources and capacity to be integrated into the system, will help address the new landscape of load growth in today’s economy, and will allow the entire system to operate much more efficiently.

The western grid is defined by the West’s geography. Ribbons of transmission cross vast, rugged and beautiful open spaces, generally moving power in one direction from large generators to more urban load centers. The eastern grid looks like honeycomb, spaghetti, or a ball of twine; the western grid looks like taffy stretched thin. Much of the foundation layer was built and is operated by the Western Area Power Administration and the Bonneville Power Administration (the Power Marketing Authorities), serving a heroic and transformative mission. Other key projects were joint ventures among multiple parties, such as the Colstrip Transmission System. We westerners are exceptionally fortunate to have the tremendous infrastructure we do. In the face of growing and changing demand and resources, we need to build on that foundation. We need a transmission barn raising.

Voluntary and Bottoms Up

The West is also defined by its skepticism of too much centralized authority. Rightly or wrongly, after several decades of hard work, there isn’t a true western Regional Transmission Organization, and efforts to impose a central authority from outside the West haven’t been well-received.

That said, the West has had great success with voluntary, pragmatic, bottoms-up work to coordinate in addressing issues of regional significance. Great examples include the embrace of day ahead markets and other technical strategies to make the West’s grid operate more efficiently and reliably and deliver benefits to customers. The Western Electricity Coordinating Council provides great technical analysis and operational rigor through standards and compliance. The Committee on Regional Electric Power Cooperation (CREPC) brings together policymakers, regulators and providers to share information and good work. Public power comes together through a variety of subregional organizations and Generation and Transmission cooperatives. Organizations like the Pacific Northwest Utility Conference Committee (PNUCC) bring together the kaleidoscope of western electric providers.

The Western Power Pool’s Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP) and Western Transmission Expansion Program (WestTEC) are especially relevant. WRAP is identifying the region’s resource needs and the extent to which we are falling short in meeting those needs. WestTEC is developing ten- and twenty-year transmission studies. The Western Transmission Consortium’s work tracks and complements these important efforts. It is agnostic to future market designs; as the focus is building the critical infrastructure the West needs now, ten years from now, and twenty years from now, and to enable any future market structure.

Addressing the West’s Collective Action Problem

Barn raising addressed a collective action problem – even if no one knew the term. No single farm or ranch family could get their necessary infrastructure built nearly as well by themselves as they could partnering with their neighbors.

The Western Transmission Consortium was intended to address today’s western collective action problem. It was inspired in part by the organizers’ successful experiences with well-structured and rigorous collaboratives, reflecting diverse and often conflicting interests, while sharing an ultimate, essential objective. We started with an extensive series of meetings with the panoply of western utility operators and stakeholders – investor-owned utilities, public power, transmission and renewable developers and investors, and regulators and policymakers. We learned a tremendous amount about the needs of different types of stakeholders, and their views on an optimal structure. Those are reflected in today’s design.

A board of regional leaders helps guide our work. You can learn more about them and TWTC’s design on this website.

Git ‘er done!

We also heard loud-and-clear the urgency to move toward project design and implementation. “Let’s get going!” As a result, we’ve undertaken a project curation process, in parallel with moving from a development company to a permanent structure. TWTC is working with Energy Strategies (the same firm supporting WestTEC) to advance a curation process focused first on near-term and high-value projects. We expect to build on these over the years, always in close coordination with other regional work.

TWTC is a western solution to a western challenge. It will succeed only if the rainbow of western stakeholders commits to making it work. Regardless of business model or philosophy, there is strong agreement on the need for collective, coordinated, and constructive action to build “the native home of hope’s” critical transmission infrastructure.

Hey everybody, let’s build a few barns!

Yours from the Rocky Mountains,

Bob Rowe